"Don't touch that, you renegade slave! I asked you a question. Who are you, and how dare you block the way of my runners? or place your unworthy hand upon my carriage! Do you not perceive who I am? Speak my words, Doulos," he ordered the Neffian, who began to repeat it all again, hysterics included.
Cheyne stood back, patiently listening and rubbing his smarting fingers, but thinking only about what he had seen of the people in the sedan. The woman was veiled, but the man was gaunt, black haired, green eyed, ashen skinned, and sported a thin mustache, twisted into a sneer. Though this was Cheyne's first actual contact with the Fascini, he had no trouble recognizing all the marks of Sumifa's leisure-loving, sickness-ridden upper crust.
But who was the woman? She wore no purple and no matron's veil. He knew that, on rare occasions, Fascini took wives from the richest families of the Mercanto, or from unprovable, if questionable, nobility in distant cities, but [avin had said that if you weren't bom into the caste, you could never really belong, and the Fascini liked it that way. Fewer people, more wealth. Especially since the western caravans had stopped. Goods were ever more expensive and harder to come by. Of course, that also meant greater profit. For some.
The patient Neffian had finished and stood waiting for Cheyne to answer.
"I'm not a slave. I'm from the… east," Cheyne answered cautiously, remembering the problem out at the site. "I didn't see your chair in time. But your runners nearly ran me over."
"Oh, for Nin's sake, address the right-hand man, you fool. You can never talk directly to me. The east. The east. Where they have no culture, no appreciation for time-honored traditions. Where your persons of rank freely mingle with commoners, where slaves whose ancestors lived in actual caves deign to talk to royalty. Really, you foreign people should not be let